Escondido & Poway Arts Centers forge ahead

Both performing arts centers in North County hope to raise their visibility & attendance next season with diverse music offerings.

California Center for the Arts, Escondido, will celebrate its 20th anniversary with its upcoming 2014/2015 season. Ten miles away, the Poway Center for the Performing Arts will celebrate its 24th season. Both city-owned venues hope to broaden their appeal with the public in, and beyond, their home bases.

California Center for the Arts, Escondido, will celebrate its 20th anniversary with its upcoming 2014/2015 season. Ten miles away, the Poway Center for the Performing Arts will celebrate its 24th season. Both city-owned venues hope to broaden their appeal with the public in, and beyond, their home bases.

The two venues differ considerably in size and a number of other ways, which we'll enumerate in a moment. But they also have some significant similarities.

Each of the two arts centers is owned (and was built) by the respective cities, Escondido and Poway, that house them. Each shares some common goals, most notably a desire to serve their respective North County communities and to use their programming to draw more audience members from across the San Diego region.

Even more significantly, each is still up and running, in contrast with El Cajon's East County Performing Arts Center, which opened in 1977 and was shuttered in 2010 because of budget restraints. (ECPAC, as the 1,145-seat facility is also known, is undergoing an upgrade and is scheduled to re-open in 2015. The city of El Cajon is seeking long-term anchor tenants; the deadline for submissions is Tuesday afternoon.)

For CCAE, which opened in 1994 and houses two concert halls, an art gallery and a conference center, the upcoming year will be a notable one. It marks the first time in several years CCAE will be producing its own season.

Since 2010, nearly all performances there have been produced by outside promoters, who rented either CCAE’s 1,500-seat Concert Hall or its adjoining 400-seat Center Theater. The move to rent the venue solely to outside promoters came in the wake of major losses at CCAE, which had deficits for 13 of its first 16 years of operation, starting with an $800,000 ticket sales shortfall after its 1994-95 opening season.

“I’m a little reluctant to say this is a rebirth,” said Jerry Van Leeuwen, who last year became CCAE’s executive director. “I would say it’s a rejuvenation, a re-invigoration of the programming.”

For PCPA, which opened in 1990 and has a seating capacity of 809, the upcoming season is designed to serve the nearby residents who are its core audience, as well as reaching beyond them.

“We’re a little off the beaten path. Unless you have occasion to visit Poway High School next door, you might not know we’re here,” said Michael Rennie, the PCPA Foundation’s executive director. “We (can) do more to share with the county at large the experience of what coming to the center is all about.”